A Pilgrim’s Digression

[Note: pictures from my vacation can be viewed at my .Mac Homepage. For easier reading, I have also made available a PDF version of this memoir in my public folder.]

Same as every year, we left West Virginia around five AM, before dawn. To facilitate our departure, I spent the night at my grandparents’ for the first time in years. How strange it felt! At 4:30, Grandpa knocked on the bedroom door and told me it was time to get up. His voice, the room, the sounds and smells–everything conveyed to me the sense that I was a small child again. Maybe the year was 1982 instead of 2005.

I showered and shaved, enjoying my last good cleansing for an entire week. I drank a little coffee. Grandpa was in and out of the house as we waited for Dad to show up. When it looked like Grandpa’s fishing partner was going to be a little late, Grandpa started acting especially nervous. The man was ready to go.

Finally, everyone was present and accounted for and after one last check of the boat trailer lights, we set off up Interstate 77. My Dad and I drove together in his Isuzu Rodeo; my Grandpa and his fishing buddy drove the friend’s Chevy Silverado. In our vehicle, Dad drove the first leg of the trip, from home to Erie, Pennsylvania. I drove from Erie, Pennsylvania to Syracuse, New York; then Dad took over and finished the trip.

Now for some general impressions of the bits of America I saw:

Ohio has absolutely the worst roads in America. Before this trip, I would have voted Pennsylvania the state with the worst roads. However, Interstate 77 from Parkersburg, West Virginia, to Cambridge, Ohio, and beyond is one long, bumpy, slow work zone.

Lake Erie as viewed from I-90 is a long, violet ribbon on the horizon. It is not recognizable as a lake from this distance. It is merely a darker strip of sky.

Going north through New York on I-81, past Syracuse, the trees begin to look blasted, as if a nuclear bomb had been detonated somewhere further north. The blast stripped the north face of the trees and bent all remaining branches south. Upstate New York looks like one of the most unattractive, desolate places to live in the country. I can’t imagine living there in winter.

I cannot bear flat states. Flatness depresses me. Buffalo, Watertown, Lackawanna; the very names sound like places young people spend their childhood hoping to escape.

What else am I thinking about on this long drive? I think about the past. Grandpa has been driving up to this lake in Ontario since approximately nineteen-sixty, a year in which he turned 28. He already had three children at that age, one of whom (my Dad) was eight years old in 1960; my one son was born in April of the year I turned 28. I often think about how old I will be compared to my Dad and Grandpa when my son graduates college, when he marries, when I have grandkids to play with. Will I be able to know my great-grandchildren, the way my own grandpa knows my son?

There is a strong element of ritual to this annual trip that I don’t believe I ever recognized as clearly as I did this year. Many rituals are repeated that were begun years, even decades ago. For example, just north of Syracuse is a town called Mattydale. When I was a child going to Canada with Grandpa and Grandma and Mom and Dad, Grandpa would always point out the sign for Mattydale and say to me, “Why, they named a town after you!” I can say with certainty that if I were riding with Grandpa today, he’d probably still say it. Similarly, when we passed the signs for Peru, New York, Grandpa would say, “Peru? Why, we’re going the wrong way!”

Grandpa’s two brothers, Jim and John, began this ritual of an annual fishing trip to Ontario around 1954, when they were in their early twenties. Before them, folks from Parkersburg were making the pilgrimage to Gordon’s Landing on the Rideau Canal as long ago as the 1940’s. An old man I knew through my grandpa, Garvin Fleischer, told me he began vacationing at Gordon’s Landing in the ’40’s after reading an article about the place in Field and Stream. Another Parkersburg native, Kurt Mace, began vacationing there in the forties as well. Rumors of the great fishing to be had on the Rideau spread by word of mouth amongst Parkersburg fishermen, and people began making the trip to Ontario an annual event.

At that time, there were no Interstates, so the drive took nearly two days over two-lane highways. Today, the drive can be made in ten and a half hours.

Gordon’s Landing, the fishing lodge where we have stayed for all these many years, is on a lake of the Rideau Canal. “Canal” probably conveys an inaccurate image of a narrow-gauge waterway through which mercantile boats pass. In between locking stations on the canal are actually large, man-made lakes of varying depths and sizes. Some like Dog Lake are deep enough (130 feet) to harbor lake trout. Others, like the one we fish, are shallow and reedy (twelve feet at its deepest spots), ideal for largemouth bass, which is what we fish for.

The lake on which we fish has no name on most maps, but on nautical charts it has the odd name River Styx; it is at the southern end of the canal and runs along the channel of what is still called the Cataraqui river, past Kingston, Ontario.

Perhaps the name River Styx comes from the fact that though the canal was completed in 1832, for nearly a hundred and fifty years afterwards the lake surface was still studded with a forest of tree trunks and stumps sticking out of the water. I imagine it rather looked like the lake in the movie On Golden Pond, eerie and surreal with its forest of dead trees growing up out of the water. When I began vacationing at the lake in the early eighties, one still had to be careful running an outboard-equipped boat across the lake. I was maybe seven or eight years old the first time I went to Canada with my family, and I’ll never forget the time I stood on the dock and watched my Dad and Grandpa going out in a boat to fish. Suddenly, there was a tremendous crash as the boat motor struck a stump under the water and was sheared cleanly off the back of the boat. It sank, but the gas lines fortunately held it long enough for Dad and Grandpa to pull it back into the boat.

Today, the regular winter ice pack has finally succeeded in crushing most of the stumps after nearly two hundred years. However, some motor busters do still exist, so low speeds are generally observed, except in the deeper water of the canal that runs from one end of the lake to the other.

Kingston is an historic town itself, most known for its penitentiary, which sits on the shores of River Styx. Prisoners are sometimes brought down to the shore to indulge in a bit of fishing, apparently as a reward for good behavior. In Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace, the title character is incarcerated at Kingston after conspiring with her lover to murder their employer.

This is the part of Ontario we visit annually, and this is the lake on which we fish, River Styx. This part of Ontario has a rocky, rugged beauty to it, though it is every bit as flat as upstate New York. For some reason I do not find it as depressing as New York, however, perhaps because the roadways in Canada seem so much cleaner.

We arrived at Gordon’s Landing around 4:30 in the evening, probably the earliest we have ever arrived. Dad and Grandpa are pleased at the good time we’ve made, as only men can be: a new record! These men are fanatical about making good time. Grandpa’s three brothers, who are also fishing up here (though at a different lake), are the Taliban of making good time. Having traveled this route every year for more than fifty years, they have the trip down to a science. They stop only at predetermined locations and for a limited time. Any deviation from the model sets them on edge. I believe if it ever occurred to them, they would carry plastic jugs in which to urinate, like truckers do, so they would not have to stop at all except for gasoline.

Gordon’s Landing consists of a large house on the hilltop, white with red trim, in which the Gordon family has lived for generations. On the hillside surrounding the house are crudely built, white with red trim cabins of varying sizes and distinctive names. The smallest, named Fee-Fee, is a sleeper; that is, it contains only a bed, nothing more. The largest, Silver Top, where we stayed when I was a child, can house a whole family. Since there are only four of us this year, as last, we stay in a cabin named Gravel Gerty.

I once asked my Dad where the names of the cabins came from. Some of the names are obvious: Silver Top is so-called because it has a tin roof. Gravel Gerty possibly comes from a character in the Dick Tracy comic strips. Gravel Gerty was the mother of a hick family who provided a comedic counterpoint to Tracy’s adventures.

Other cabins are named after dead people who stayed at Gordon’s landing in the forties and fifties. Fee-fee was the name of a Boston Terrier belonging to someone known only as “the Fat Lady.” I’ll have more to tell about her presently. The cabin called “Link’s” was named after someone known only as “the Chinaman.” And “Chief’s Place” was named after, you guessed it, Chief. These characters begin to sound like they were thought up by Quentin Tarantino. But really, the Fat Lady is the only one I know much about. Link (maybe Ling, since he was Asian) stayed here through the sixties with a whole family of Asian Americans, and Grandpa talks about seeing at least six of them standing in a small wooden boat trying to fish. He tells the story of them all lined up in the boat like wooden soldiers, and then he laughs at how green they were, yet still they caught fish. Everyone caught lots of fish in those golden years, no matter how little one knew of fishing.

Chief was another West Virginian, from Parkersburg, whose real name is now forgotten even by Grandpa. He was a huge man. That is all that is remembered.

My Grandpa’s friend Garvin and his wife Marge, whom I also knew in their last years, stayed in a cabin called “Hey Mabel.” “Hey Mabel, Black Label” was a slogan and advertising jingle used to sell Black Label beer in the forties. Garvin and Marge definitely had the best cabin at the lodge. It had a small, screened porch that overlooked the lake, and it received the best breeze. When Grandpa and his brothers first began staying at Gordon’s Landing, Garvin and Marge seemed standoffish and proud. Garvin was a self-employed electrician back home in Parkersburg, so he and Marge were well off financially, which set them apart from other campers on the lake. My Grandma came to Gordon’s Landing a couple of times in the seventies, and she says that her memory of Marge is of someone who always looked clean and dressed to the nines, despite the miseries of living for a week or more in a mosquito-infested cabin with no running water.

By the time Garvin and Marge died in the nineteen-nineties, Grandpa and Grandma would be their best and only friends. They never had children and left everything they owned to my Grandpa. Garvin gave me an old, but pristine Royal typewriter dating probably to the forties. He also willed me an expensive, rare Belgian-made Browning 16-guage shotgun.

After arriving around four-thirty, we launch our boats and tie them up to the dock. Then we go up to the main house to buy our fishing licenses. We buy a seven-day conservation license, which allows us to keep two bass apiece per day–enough for lunch essentially–but does not allow us to take any home. This is a considerable change from the way we used to go about our fishing. At one time, the fishing was so good that we would buy a license that allowed each of us to take large numbers of fish back to the States. When we left at the end of the week, every available cooler would be packed with fish filets.

The consequences of our greed, and the greed of everyone else doing the exact same thing, was that the fishing declined. Now after about twenty years of being more conservation-minded, the fishing has picked back up again.

After buying our licenses, we go out fishing for a few hours before dark. That first evening, I catch what will be the largest bass I catch all week, a medium-size fellow 18 inches long and weighing about 3.3 pounds. I would catch a similar-sized fish every day, sometimes twice a day. Not spectacular by Lake Okeechobee standards, but good for Canada, where the growing season for bass is considerably shorter than in Florida. The day before our trip ended, my Dad catches the biggest bass of the trip, a nineteen inch, five pounder, a stubby creature looking and feeling very much like a football stuffed with lead. I’ve never seen a bass bigger than five pounds, though supposedly eight pounders have been dragged from the depths of River Styx.

Most days of our vacation are all the same. We rise at dawn and eat a bowl of cheerios. We fill a thermos with coffee, put a couple bottles of frozen water in a cooler alongside a plastic baggie containing a couple pieces of pound cake, “and then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea…”

Ontario was scorching this year. It was as hot, if not hotter, than I remember during my first trip here back around 1980. I was a small lad then, not eight years old, and I only went out fishing occasionally. When not fishing, I stayed at the cabin and played with my Star Wars figures in the dirt outside, or waded at the edge of the lake. Actually, I only did the latter once. When I came up out of the lake, I had probably fifty leeches clinging to my legs. When I ran screaming up to the cabin, Mom and Grandma had to remove the leeches one by one with salt. As they pulled at a leech, my skin would stretch out until the leech let go with a slight pop that may have been mostly in my imagination. Trickles of blood ran down my legs like scarlet ribbons. Not much later, I would read Laura Ingall’s experience with leeches on the banks of Plum creek, and I would sympathize. I knew how she felt.

This year, the temperature sores into the mid-nineties every day, and there are many afternoons when I think I might brave the leeches again. One afternoon, I tried unsuccessfully to talk Dad and Grandpa into going out swimming with me. There is a large island in the lake with a rocky shore, but a sandy coast, ideal for swimming. I remember a special time years ago, fishing with my Dad and Mom, when in the middle of a hot day of fishing we drifted near the island and Dad said to hell with fishing and to hell with convention, and we three took off our clothes and went in the lake nude. I’d appreciate a swim right now, though I brought swimming trunks this time, so I don’t have to frighten the fish by going in nude.

Bathing is problematic at Gordon’s Landing. When Grandpa first started coming here, there was no running water in the cabins. One had to take a bucket to the main house to collect water on a regular basis. Even today, the only shower at the lodge is in the basement of the main house, and it is a rotten place to bathe, cramped and dirty. Salamanders and spiders live in the shower stall, and the water is impossible to adjust comfortably. The weather was at least hot enough this year that I did not even bother trying to take a hot shower; cold showers were the norm, and appreciated, even with a salamander crawling across one’s toes.

Around noon, we return to Gordon’s with our catch of the day. Dad and I each keep two bass, as do Grandpa and his friend. We fry them up straight away and have them for lunch with boiled potatoes and carrots. This is our regular fare, simple and hearty. I never tire of it. After lunch, we take naps, or read, or take a shower, or sit in a camp chair out on the hill beside “Hey Mabel,” where Garvin and Marge used to sit eons ago.

Around four, we go back out to fish until dark. Dad and I sometimes wait until five on the hottest days. In the evenings, we do not bring any fish back to camp. For dinner, we eat food my Grandma cooked and packed for us: homemade bean soup, homemade vegetable soup, hot dogs with her homemade chili (in West Virginia we called it “hot dog sauce,” but my wife tells me it’s properly called chili), ham sandwiches made from a whole ham Grandma cut off the bone and sliced, Grandma’s fresh, cold pasta salad. Good eats.

After dinner, someone volunteers to do the dishes. Soon after nine, we are all in bed.

Since the cabin only had three beds, and since I was the youngest, I slept in the back of my Dad’s Isuzu Rodeo. First I tried spreading my sleeping bag on the floor of the cabin, but it was too hard. Within a half hour my right arm was numb and my back was killing me and I had no chance of falling asleep.

Sleeping in the back of an Isuzu Rodeo would not have been bad, except that it was so fucking hot, even at night. I had to start the engine and run the air conditioner for about ten minutes after getting in the vehicle, just to dissipate the afternoon heat. I would sleep for awhile, then wake up sweating and run the air conditioner some more. Finally, in the early morning, the outside temperature cooled enough that I did not need to wake up and run the air conditioner. As for my back, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I slept better in that Rodeo than I do in my own bed. Of course, I was taking prescription-strength Aleve before bed, but I don’t think the medicine had too much to do with my temporary relief from back pain. I think it was the firmness of my “bed” that helped my back, though too firm (the cabin floor) was bad for it.

Why did I not roll down the windows in the vehicle, you ask? The ferocity of the mosquitoes up there is impossible to explain to someone who has never experienced them. Maybe someone from Minnesota, or some other northern or mid-western state would understand. The mosquitoes are huge, they fly in swarms, and they are ravenous. If I had rolled down the vehicle’s windows, every ounce of blood would have been drained from my body by morning and Dad and Grandpa would have found my desiccated corpse atop my sleeping bag, withered and sere like some twig in the desert.

In the night before sleep, you lie there on top of your sleeping bag, usually naked because of the heat, and even though you may have sprayed yourself down with repellant, you can still hear the drone of mosquitoes buzzing in your ear in the darkness. It is not a pleasant sound or feeling.

Twice during the week, when I would lie in the Rodeo alternately reading and napping, I left the doors open too long and ran down the battery on the vehicle. Unfortunately, I never discovered this circumstance until I tried to start the car to run the air conditioner before going to bed. These were my worst two nights. The heat was stifling. The second time it happened, on Wednesday morning June 29th, I again tried sleeping on the cabin floor. It was too much for me. The floor was hard, the old men were snoring like three of Snow White’s dwarves…I decided the heat was preferable to that.

Despite the heat, we really caught a lot of fish, as many as fifty bass per person each day. We never count the northern pike we catch. They are a nuisance, and whenever possible we try to keep from catching them. They break fishing line, destroy tackle, and they are slimy and smelly and difficult to get off a hook. They have razor-like teeth on which I’ve ripped my hand open more than a couple times. They like to follow a bait right up to the boat, then strike with a mighty, heart-attack-inducing splash just as you begin to pull your bait out of the water. Often they will snap the bait right off at this point.

I like to use an old-fashioned bait called a Johnson Silver Minnow. Unfortunately, pike love it just as much as bass, and before each trip I have to buy at least six. None of the six ever make it home. I told Dad once that if I ever had a Johnson Silver Minnow survive a trip to Canada, I’d retire it and place it under glass in my office.

Dad and Grandpa used to think it a little odd that I use what is essentially a little-used, antique bait. Dad and Grandpa use spinners and plastic worms and buzz baits and crank baits and all the modern tools of the sport. I use mostly the trusty, silver “weedless wonder,” precisely because it is weedless. I catch just as many fish as they do. The only drawback is that I also catch more pike than they do because pike love that Silver Minnow.

Dad and Grandpa both said the fishing this year was “like old times,” by which they meant the fishing was as good as it used to be in the forties, fifties, and sixties. If the fishing was “like old times,” then “old times” must not be the Golden Age I always imagined. The fishing was good this year, but I always imagined the “old times” of which they spoke as being beyond imagination. Grandpa once told me about going out in an old, leaky, wooden rowboat and catching so many fat bass they ran out of room on the stringer and started tossing them in the soggy bottom of the boat where the fish swam around between their feet. That now sounds a bit like a fisherman’s tall tale, but I believed it at the time.

I’ve heard many other tales in my lifetime as a fisherman. When you’re out in a boat with my Dad and Grandpa you hear a lot of talk. You also learn a lot about a whole range of things. Grandpa whistles and sings songs, mostly old Hank Williams songs, sometimes interspersed with a Waylon Jennings tune. Grandpa always jokes that this is the “entertainment” and that he is charging per song. He does not take requests, however.

My Grandpa taught me about birds during our many fishing expeditions. Grandpa can identify just about every type of bird on land or water in the eastern United States and Canada, and he knows their songs, too. Thus one day this week, while I was fishing with Dad, I heard an Eastern Wood Thrush singing and being answered by another. And I could imitate its whistle as well. These things I learned from my Grandpa.

Of the stories grandpa has told me over the years, none has been better than the story of the Fat Lady and how her boat sank. Grandpa is a natural storyteller. When I was very little and would stay overnight at Grandma and Grandpa’s, Grandpa would tell me bedtime stories. He never told the usual fairytales about Goldilocks, the Three Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, however. He always told me stories about fishing in Canada, or stories about his hunting experiences, or just stories of his life, like how he and his brothers defeated a bully in his neighborhood growing up.

Thus before I had ever visited Gordon’s Landing, Grandpa was telling me about the time the Fat Lady’s boat sank. After hearing the story once, it became my favorite and I always asked for it at bedtime. So it happened that one afternoon recently after lunch, and after the old codgers had retired to sit in their chairs on the hill overlooking the lake, I asked Grandpa to tell the story again. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, and I was surprised at some racier details Grandpa had neglected to add to the story when he told it to me as a child.

Grandpa’s younger brother John told Grandpa this story. The events depicted in it happened in the fifties, before Grandpa started coming to Gordon’s Landing. John was a participant in what happened.

The Fat Lady was an immigrant to America from Germany who lived in Rochester, New York. She drove up to Gordon’s landing every summer and stayed for a week or two. She always came alone except for her Boston Terrier, Fee-Fee, and she stayed in the tiny cabin that was named for her dog. One of the details Grandpa adds in this telling is that every morning at dawn, she would come out of her cabin, hike up her dress, and squat and pee right there next to the doorstep.

For some reason, this detail added to her fatness conjures an image of someone either incredibly decadent, or someone uncouth; however, I disperse this impression by remembering that we men naturally pee outside when we have to, and sometimes when we don’t have to. There are no bathrooms in Gordon’s cabins; the only bathrooms are in the basement of the main house or in one of the outhouses scattered around the grounds, so it is more common than not for men to just find a private bush and relieve themselves. Is it any worse for a woman to do the same?

Well, maybe she shouldn’t have peed right at her doorstep anyway.

After taking care of her business, the Fat Lady would then go down to the dock and go out for a day of fishing on the lake. She used one of Gordon’s wooden boats, leaky and underpowered by a small five horse power motor. She always fished in the same spot, Grandpa says. You’d see her anchored off that point of land just above the prison, fishing for bullhead catfish, her little bulldog either asleep in the bottom of the boat or standing at attention in the bow.

One morning, as everyone was preparing to go out fishing, she set off in her boat and before she could reach the channel, she struck a stump and punched a hole in the bottom of her boat. When the Fat Lady’s first cries reached shore, John was preparing to go out fishing; Garvin and Marge were there, too, preparing to go out fishing. Garvin at that time was known only as a rather pretentious and proud fellow. He chewed tobacco and was always gumming a wad in his jaw. He always wore long, rubber boots, and was known to like to take charge of matters despite his usual standoffish attitude. So Garvin took charge. He stumped around the docks in his rubber boots, ordering men into boats between spits of tobacco juice, and together about three boats set off to rescue the woman.

When they reached her, only the portion of the boat on the stump was still above water. The bulldog was yapping frantically in the bow, which was still above water. The Fat Lady was in the submerged portion of the boat, hanging on for dear life and calling for help.

I don’t know if you have ever went swimming off an ordinary fishing boat before, so you may not know that once in the water, it is very difficult for even an ordinary-sized person to haul themselves back aboard. Add the weight and entanglement of clothes, and getting out of the water can become impossible. Think of how much more difficult it would be for a large person. John and Garvin and the other men could not get the Fat Lady into a boat. It was physically impossible.

What was finally decided was that they would tie a rope around her and she would hang on to the side of a boat and they would haul her into shore. Her bulldog, of course, was already safe in one of the rescue boats. This plan worked well enough, but (and here comes another detail Grandpa previously left out) when she crawled up onto shore the waves washed her dress right up to her armpits revealing everything she had to anyone who cared to have a look. She was not wearing any underwear.

When I was small, the punchline of the story was a little different. Grandpa would say, “And do you know what that old cheapskate Gordon did?” I’d say, “No, grandpa. What?” Grandpa would say, “That tightwad, he brought that boat back to shore, patched it with a piece of tin, and rented it out later that morning.”

Although the story is meant to be humorous, I now see it in a different way, hearing it retold after so long. I think of how embarrassed the Fat Lady must have felt, first not being able to get into a boat, and then having herself exposed to these men. The story has some definite voyeuristic and degrading aspects to it; it’s a sample of the kind of mildly salacious story men tell each other while fishing. Later, while fishing with my Dad, and despite my sympathy with the Fat Lady, in my mind I add my own erotic details to the story. When one is camping without any women for a week, one has little else to think of except sex, and so I fantasized about the Fat Lady spreading her legs for all these men as payment for rescuing her. I am one of the men who rescue her, taking the place of Grandpa’s brother John in the story.

The Fat Lady exists no more, except in my ficto-historical story. Somewhere, maybe she has the remnants of a family who still remember her. Otherwise, she is gone, effaced and nameless, nothing more now than a ribald tale.

Garvin and Marge are dead. Garvin, who would never reveal what kind of bait he used and, when asked if he were catching anything, always deliberately underreported the number of fish he was catching. Dead. The Chief, dead. Link, dead. Old Man Gordon, who I only met once or twice before he died, dead. Gordon was once a professional hockey player in Canada. In the winter, when the lake froze over and the fishermen gave way to duck hunters, he made his living cutting ice from the frozen lake and selling it in Kingston. But he is dead now. His wife, who for many years had a pet robin, she is dead, too, though relatively recently.

So much death. Our annual vacation is actually more like a ritualized memorial for the dead. In the afternoons, the old men sit on the hillside looking over the lake, talking about the dead. Grandpa’s brother John may have prostate cancer, Grandpa tells us for the first time. He has been bleeding. Nevertheless, he has made the journey to Canada anyway. It may be his last trip. Death feels close, for him and for us all.

Why is it so natural for me to turn morbid at what ought to be a happy occasion? Why would a vacation remind me of my own death, and the more imminent death of loved ones? I can never enjoy anything because I always remind myself how quickly it ends. Even as my body is enjoying itself, it’s like my mind is saying, “Sure, have fun, but remember how close we all stand to death. Pleasure is fleeting, youth and beauty a mere shadow. You will die.” And so whatever fun I may be having is dissipated, made tragic.

So much passes away from the earth, not just people, but everything. Change is natural, but dreadful. The winter ice crushes the stumps in the lake, altering it from a creepy, tree-filled River Styx to something more serene. I wish I had known it in its Stygian days. People die and are remembered as mere figments. Nothing remains. The lone and level sands stretch far away. The emptiness of life is so vast, there are times I think I’ll go mad contemplating it. There is nothing, nothing that is lasting.

I turn from these things. Masturbate to the fantasy of the Fat Lady. Pleasure, but it won’t last. God save me. Please.

Although we originally planned to return to Parkersburg on Thursday the thirtieth of June, by Wednesday evening it is over. Wednesday morning, a windstorm blew through about three AM, cracking trees and churning up the lake, disturbing the fish. I woke up with the storm and opened the doors of the Rodeo (this happened to be one of the nights I had no air conditioning). I figured the mosquitoes would be repelled by all the wind. The wind was exhilarating, blowing through the vehicle and shaking it like a puppy shaking a chew toy. Then I remembered I was in a vehicle parked under a maple tree. I got up, pulled on my shorts and a tee shirt, shoes, and walked down to the lake in the darkness to make sure the boats weren’t being beaten apart against the docks. The boats were OK; the wind was blowing them away from the docks, stretching the ropes that bound them to the docks but otherwise not harming them.

The next day, though the weather had returned to normal–hot, humid–fishing had turned off. It was over. That afternoon, Dad and I decided we’d pack up and head home that evening, driving through the night as we have sometimes done in the past.

Leaving is always difficult. You wonder if you will come back next year. As tired as you might be, as eager as you might be for a real, hot shower, leave-taking is difficult. Grandpa stayed for another two days, not leaving until Friday, though the fishing did not pick up. I suspect his stubbornness in persisting has more to do with a desire to prolong whatever easement he obtains from the fears of old age that haunt him. Or maybe he’s not haunted by death, as I am, and he just really likes fishing. He does like fishing. But his dedication to it is almost unnatural. At some point, you just have to say, “Enough. It is finished.”

Leaving is hard. We tell ourselves, “This place never changes.” And superficially, Gordon’s Landing and the lake it rests on never does change. The red and white cabins are much the same as they have been for sixty years. Twenty-five years ago, Old Man Gordon dragged up a wooden duck hunter�s boat on shore near the docks; it’s still there. Dad says the crappy shower stall still has the same miss-matched faucet handles as when he was a teenager.

So yes, on the surface, if we come back here next year, most everything will be the same. But nothing will be the same. To live is to die slowly, and to eventually fade out of existence entirely. The thought of it happening not just to me, but to my Grandpa, my Dad, all those I love and care about, is the thought that has terrorized me since I was a child afraid of whatever lurked in my bedroom closet. Death is the shadow that walks with us wherever we may go.